Current Project Status

ELKS has moved to GitHub

Official ELKS source code and disk images are hosted at
https://github.com/jbruchon/elks.
Project development was restarted in 2014 and we are actively working towards a
fully functional Linux-like system for 16-bit x86 PCs and embedded systems.
This website remains here for historical purposes; much of the history of ELKS
is located here and there is information that is not easily found without the
site staying where it is. Please note that this site will not be actively
maintained any longer; the GitHub page is considered to be the primary site now,
and all development and important documentation can be found there.

As of March 2015 (the last update to this website),
ELKS 0.2.0 has been released with disk images suitable for most platforms.
Most of the worst bugs in ELKS are fixed. We have a greatly simplified
build process that is friendly to people who
are not familiar with ELKS; simply run ./build.sh in the source code root and it
automatically runs the necessary build commands for you.

We still have a long way to go. The userspace commands do not provide meaningful
help text, there is no network support beyond the ancient SLIP method, and we
could really use a compiler expert to fix up the Dev86/bcc compiler to break the
64KB code size barrier imposed by 8086 segmentation. What is important today is
that the ELKS project has reached a minimally usable state. For example, ELKS
0.2.0 images are used by
FreeGeek Chicago for erasing
personal data from vintage IBM PC-compatible computers.

If you want to be a part of the ELKS project, please feel free to download a copy
of the code and play with it. Email
the current maintainer
if you have any questions, or subscribe to the mailing list (link above).